It looks, at first glance, like something a builder might have left behind. In fact it is a medieval font, an object once used to hold holy water in a church that no longer stands, and it arrived here not through any official transfer or ecclesiastical process, but because a grieving widow decided to move it herself.

The font originally belonged to the Church of Kilmactalway, a medieval parish church whose remains lie in a graveyard a few miles away. It was noted there by Dalton, a historian of County Dublin, before eventually being relocated. The move is recorded not in any church register but in an inscription mounted above the font itself, composed by Ellen Maria Bagot. Her text explains that the church at Kilmactalway had been on Bagot family property for centuries, and that she removed the font and placed it at St Finian's in memory of her husband, James John Bagot, who died on the 9th of June 1860. The inscription closes with a plainly worded appeal: "Pray for him also for me." St Finian's itself was a relatively recent building at the time, constructed in 1813, as an inscription over its door records, and described in 1904 as having monuments from that date in its graveyard along with several notable memorial windows. The font therefore arrived into a church that was already accumulating its own layers of memory.

The church is in Newcastle South, a small settlement in west County Dublin. The font sits at the west door on the north side, so it is encountered almost immediately on entering. It is, as J. Fowler noted when writing about St Finian's for the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland in 1906, a fairly sizeable object despite its rough, unworked appearance. The inscription above it is worth reading in full; the language is unusually direct for a memorial text, and the combination of a medieval object and a Victorian personal dedication makes for an arresting pairing in what is otherwise a modest, working parish church.